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ORESTEIA OF AESCHYLUS winter 2013 ums
10
Oresteia of Aeschylus
L’Agamemnon (1913)
Les Choéphores (1915–6)
Les Euménides (1917–23)
Darius Milhaud
Born September 4, 1892 in Marseilles,
France
Died June 22, 1974 in Geneva,
Switzerland
Translated to French by Paul Claudel
from the English translation by A. W.
Verrall.
Darius Milhaud was an important
member of the musical avant-garde in
early 20th-century Paris. Provençal and
Jewish by birth, he maintained these and
numerous other identities in his music
and his life. A lifelong interest in classical
mythology and drama, a wide knowledge
of French music history, and his
utilization of modern theoretical trends
all played a role in the composition of his
early operatic trilogy, L’Orestie. These
complex works draw from Milhaud’s
numerous identities and interests
in a dramatic, rhythmic expression of
Aeschylus’s classic story.
Milhaud’s lifelong collaboration
with the Catholic poet Paul Claudel
played a critical role in the composer’s
operatic style. The collaboration
resulted in many of Milhaud’s bestknown
works, including the Orestie
trilogy and Christophe Colomb (1930).
The style developed by Milhaud and
Claudel was influenced prominently by
Claudel’s belief that every element of a
dramatic work, including music, should
exist to serve the poetry. The Orestie
trilogy displays this attention to the
text through the expressive, syncopated
rhythm of the vocal parts.
Musically, Milhaud saw himself as
part of a great French tradition which
extended back from Satie and Debussy
to Bizet and even to Couperin. Among
his contemporaries, Milhaud associated
most strongly with the fellow members
of Les Six (Georges Auric, Louis Durey,
Arthur Honegger, Milhaud, Francis
Poulenc, and Germaine Tailleferre), a
group of composers brought together by
Jean Cocteau in the 1920s in an effort to
forge a new French modernist musical
aesthetic during the interwar period.
Despite his integration into the
French tradition, Milhaud prominently
incorporated other national styles into
his own. In a life-changing experience
in 1917, Milhaud and Claudel traveled
to Brazil on a diplomatic mission. After
his diplomatic service, Milhaud began
to incorporate Brazilian folk music into
his compositions, most famously in the
1919 ballet Le boeuf sur le toit (The
Ox on the Roof), but also seen here in
Les Euménides. As a composer already
drawn to rhythmic expression, Milhaud
was particularly interested in the
rhythmic complexity of Brazilian music.
In addition to innovative rhythmic
elements, the Orestie trilogy exhibits
complex harmonic techniques,
particularly polytonality, in which
Milhaud layered two or more harmonic
areas simultaneously. Milhaud’s use
of polytonality is particularly clear in
the finale of Les Euménides, which is
structured around repeated polytonal
patterns. Although this polytonality may
sound dissonant, Milhaud believed that it
gave him more varied ways of expressing
sweetness in addition to violence.
Because the three parts of the
Orestie trilogy were written over a 10-
year period, each work has a distinct
style. In L’ Agamemnon, written when
Milhaud was only 21, the rhythm of the
vocal parts is used to express the drama
of the poetry, while in Les Choéphores
and especially in Les Euménides, the
drama is furthered by spoken sections